Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Adare cursed him silently. Why he had chosen this particular moment, after a lifetime of lies, to cleave to the truth, she had no idea, but she pressed ahead regardless. “You might not know, but you have ideas.” If there was one thing she’d learned about Ran il Tornja, it was that the man had ideas. On politics. On war. On love. He might not know what had gone wrong with Oshi and Nira, but he’d had hundreds of years to wonder. “You have theories,” she said.

He watched her from beneath hooded eyes, then chuckled. “I do,” he replied.

“And now that you have the last two Atmani here,” Adare said, gesturing to Nira and Oshi, “it’s possible you can help them.”

He hesitated. “There is always a possibility.”

“ Fuck possibility,” Nira growled. “It was possibility that broke us in the first place. I will have my revenge, and see an end to this.”

The words were rock hard, sharp as chipped obsidian, but Adare could see something in the old woman’s face, the first crumbling of doubt.

Adare tried to speak directly to that doubt, driving her argument into the hesitation like mason’s spikes hammered into a stone’s seam. “You can make that decision for yourself, Nira, but not for your brother.”

“Don’t go lecturin’ me on what I can and can’t do. I’ve been makin’ his decisions since before your fucking empire was born, girl.”

Adare nodded, meeting her eyes. “You’ve protected him all this time-for what? So you could find a man, kill him, then die? Did you keep going all these centuries just for this?”

“Pretty much.”

“There is another end to this story,” Adare said, praying to Intarra that the woman would see, would understand, that the long years had not burned out of her the capacity for hope.

Nira stared at her, jaw set, then turned her eyes to the kenarang. For a long time she just watched him, studying the man’s face as though it were a page from a book in some barely remembered language.

“I tried to fix it,” he said quietly. “The world we broke”-he gestured toward Adare-“building Annur was an effort to put it right.”

“Annur can bugger itself bloody,” the old woman replied, lips drawn back from her jagged teeth.

“Do we fight, sister?” Oshi asked again, staring at il Tornja with an almost rabid intensity. “Is it time at last?”

Nira looked over at him, watched as her brother’s cheek twitched and his fingers clenched and unclenched around the grip of some unseen weapon. He shook as though palsied, and though he had stopped speaking, his lips continued to shape silent words. Slowly, moving for the first time since Adare met her with a weariness appropriate to her age, Nira raised a hand and set it gently on Oshi’s shoulder. “No,” she said quietly. “Not yet.”

Then, as abruptly as it had bloomed, the collar of flame around the kenarang ’s neck seemed to … twist. The air around it went strange, dark, and then it vanished. Nira sagged against her brother, the strength drained from her legs, but her voice was strong when she spoke, her eyes bright.

“The collar isn’t gone,” she said. “Just hidden. It will move with you, shift with you, travel with you so readily you don’t even know it’s there. You’ll be the freest slave in the world, but you’ll be my slave. At a word from me, at a thought, it will tighten and end you.”

Il Tornja cocked his head to the side. “Using your power like this, Rishinira…”

The woman hacked a jagged laugh out of the air. “Will do what? Make me insane?”

“Indeed.”

“Then you’d better figure out a way to make me better again before I lose my mind. A little more encouragement for you to help my brother. Ya don’t want a crazy woman holding your leash, I can promise you that.” She turned to Adare. “You think you need him? Use him. But when you’re not using him to save your little empire, he will be working to fix my brother, bending all his long life’s learning to making right what he has broken.” She raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that how it will be?”

The kenarang nodded, a thoughtful, measured gesture.

“Good,” Nira said. “Because the day you stop trying to heal us, the day you forget your leash and turn on us, is the day I cut you into a dozen pieces and leave you for the ravens.”

Il Tornja took a step forward, tested the air in front of his throat with a hand, then another step.

“You could be bluffing,” he observed.

Nira’s smile was like a knife. “Test it.”

To Adare’s surprise, he chuckled, shaking his head ruefully, as though he’d just lost a few suns in a hand of cards. “I’ll take your word for it. Now,” he went on, turning to Adare as though the two of them were just wrapping up a somewhat dull bureaucratic function, “there is much to prepare. My men have erected a pavilion for you in the center of the camp. You’ll be comfortable there, and more importantly, safe. The first thing-”

“Where,” Adare demanded, cutting him off, “are the Urghul?”

He grimaced. “By now? Most likely a day or two from the northern end of the lake.”

Adare hesitated. “So, at least three or four days from us, right? Isn’t that good news?”

“Hardly. Long Fist crossed north of the confluence, well north of our last garrison. It looks like he’s headed around the north end of the lake. He’s still got the Black River to get past, which he’ll almost certainly do at Andt-Kyl, but Andt-Kyl is far from here and we need to get there first. If he crosses before we arrive, it’s over. He won’t be able to move quickly through the forest, but he won’t have to. There are no more choke points after Andt-Kyl. He can split his army in ten, send them all in different directions. There’ll be bodies hanging from the branches from the Ghost Sea to the Romsdals.”

Adare stared, aghast. “So what are we doing here? Why aren’t you marching north?”

He crossed to the fire and held his hands a moment in front of the blaze before answering. “You see the terrain we’ve been moving through?” he asked at last. “Bogs. Swamps. Streams. Firs so tight you can’t slide between them?”

Adare nodded.

“North of here, it’s all like that, and no good road through it. There’s a forest track up the west coast of the lake, but an army this size would churn it to mud. We’d be weeks picking our way, and we don’t have weeks.”

“So you’ve decided to do a little civil engineering instead?” Adare demanded. “Nine out of every ten men you have are sleeping in a ’Kent-kissing field right now! They could at least try the western track.”

The kenarang smiled. “There’s a quote from Hendran’s Tactics that I’m fond of. Chapter fourteen: ‘Never fight,’ I believe it says, ‘when you can rest.’ ”

Kaden prepared, as he approached the high-walled estate of Gabril the Red, for disbelief or fury, a fist in the face or a knife in the gut. He tried to run through various scenarios, to anticipate what the young nobleman might say or do, but the future proved as blank and inscrutable as the limestone walls of Gabril’s mansion. Annurian law stipulated that no one, regardless of wealth or rank, could build a fortress inside the city. Early emperors had learned that lesson the hard way, and since the empire’s second century, private dwellings were required to have a certain number of windows and a gate in every exterior wall. Moats were illegal, hoardings atop the walls were illegal, arrow loops were illegal. Gabril the Red’s estate complied with the letter of the law. Barely.

The windows fronting the street were tall and graceful, arched at their peaks, but so slim Kaden would have had to turn sideways to slide through them. The main gate was open, but guarded by half a dozen men in long desert robes. More guards patrolled the top of the wall, each one with a spear or a bow ready to hand. The place wasn’t a fort, not exactly, but Kaden was under no illusions. Inside those walls, Gabril could kill him a dozen times over and no one would ever know.